HER-2
The Waiting (Room)
Ever since I started a daily radiation treatment to kill whatever cancer cells might still be lurking in my breast, I have become one of the “regulars” at the radiology/oncology waiting room at USC’s Norris Breast Cancer Clinic. Every detail of that room is etched on my brain: the tropical fish INTENDED to calm me, the reading material that FAILS to calm me (Cancer Today!), the other patients who actually DO calm me. Sometimes it just takes an empathic look that says: “I’m in the same WTF place you are!”
The Waiting Room is a perfect metaphor for life. It’s the place where we come face to face with powerlessness, where we are forced to sit with uncertainty, where fear sits down next to us and whispers mortal truths in our ear. Sitting with fear is a real bitch. As Woody Allen once said, “I don’t like to be afraid — it scares me.” Sometimes we suffer from the illusion that if we just WRITE about our fears, we can control them. Certainly, that was on our minds when we started this series of posts about our dual diagnoses of breast cancer. But the Waiting Room is the place where that illusion is shattered and we are forced to accept the universal truth: Godot will not come. Fear and uncertainty are universal emotions and trying to ignore them only makes them stronger. We can all look for an exit, a free pass, a SIGN, but the only sign I see as I wait for my turn under the zapping machine is just
outside the treatment door. When someone is inside getting zapped, the sign lights up with the words “Beam On.” It looks just like those “On Air’ lights outside the studios where I used to work.
What a strange metamorphosis. Just below that sign is a gong and bell. I asked one of the technicians what it was for, and he responded, “We let the patients hit that gong on their last day of treatment…to celebrate.” And so the seed is planted for that familiar old illusion of control, of power, of self-determination. I think of it as the “Godot Gong.” And I can’t wait to hit it.
There’s a song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers called “The Waiting.” It’s not a song about cancer or about illness for that matter, but somehow it speaks to me.
In most of the classes I teach, I spend time talking about making meaning, and how meanings don’t always come from the producers of culture (the songwriters, the filmmakers, the artists), but from the consumers, or the audience. We bring our own meanings into play in order to help make sense of the world around us.
When my mother had cancer five years ago, I shared the song with her because as Petty sings, “the waiting is the hardest part.” I’m finding this out for myself right now.
Over the last three weeks, I have waited for doctor appointments, for tests to be done, and for results to be conveyed. I’ve done some good people watching and seen some bad daytime television. But as I entered the fourth week of this HER2+ adventure, I faced one of the hardest days of waiting.
I had a PET CT scan of my body at 7am on February 26. (This involved intravenously receiving radioactive sugar, lounging in a semi-darkened room for an hour or so, and then inching my body from head to toe through a tubular machine). The semi-darkened “quiet room” was the nicest waiting
experience I’ve had so far. I put my feet up. I got a warm blanket. As I looked down at my feet, I could have been poolside or at the beach. Almost. I could have gone to sleep. Except for the fact that the guy next to me (clearly a regular) was snoring. Just like home.
Once the scan was over, I didn’t have to wait long for a phone call. I was driving on the freeway at 10:30 am when my surgeon called to ask if it was a good time to talk. It’s never a good time. It seems every time the doctors call, I’m either in the car or walking the dog. She told me they saw “something” in my liver on the scan, but they weren’t sure what it was.
After eight hours of anxiously and distractedly waiting (and having an echocardiogram of my heart where I was told to relax), I heard from my oncologist. The “something” in my liver was actually two very “hot” spots (not the good/wifi variety) and another hot area in the adjacent lymph nodes. The HER2+, known for its aggressive over-“expression,” was on the move. And it had found another place to settle. All of that waiting, and things quickly changed from bad to worse. In an instant, I was bumped up two stages. My Stage 2 diagnosis was now Stage 4. And, over the weekend, I finally figured out how to spell metastasized —my mnemonic: it begins with “me.”
The treatment will be the same. I start chemotherapy on Friday, March 4 — four weeks exactly from the day of my ill-fated mammogram. It’s all moving so fast, despite all the waiting.
I’ve had to sit with this news — my own kind of waiting. I thought about one of my favorite Dr. Suess books — Oh The Places You’ll Go. One of those places is “the waiting place.” Sometimes children’s books are ahead of the curve and tackle issues more authentically than self-help books or adult reflections. Among a string of adventures and setbacks, ups and downs, the waiting place may be the hardest place. I also am keenly aware that there will be a lot more waiting ahead.
Read our first post here. And, stay tuned as we continue to wait via our writing, and to very deliberately kick cancer’s ass!
